Few modern musical artists boast the balance Taylor Jules keeps between entertaining listeners and making an enduring artistic statement.
Los Angeles is a traditional hub for up-and-coming singer/songwriters to begin building their reputations. The City of Angels has given Taylor Jules a high-visibility platform for broadcasting her talents across the pop world, and her considerable gifts compel us to listen. The latest single from this exploding new star is “Waterfall”, the second such release from an upcoming EP release due in 2025, and it illustrates the mammoth combination of skills, charisma, and passion that’s set to make Taylor Jules a crossover force we’ll be hearing from for scores of years to come.
She’s far too good for the indie scene to hold her long. Barring the unforeseen. she’s bound for the biggest stages and largest audiences.
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The presentation alone makes that clear. A clear-eyed vision of what she wants “Waterfall” to sound like announces itself from the first. It never balloons into lead-footed bathos, but Jules’ creativity, for this song at least, feasts on a quasi-theatrical tone. You hear it in the extra effects added to her initial vocals and the production adornments coloring the instrumentation. You can also hear that she firmly grasps the dynamic potential. The audible ebb and flow driving the main body forward catches you early and doesn’t let go until the end.
It’s easy to fall into the song’s lyrical web. Jules has an undoubted skill for using imagery to convey emotion, and the resulting “show, don’t tell” aesthetic governing “Waterfall” is one of its principal strengths. She strikes an excellent balance between lines of generalized lines of pure exposition and those aforementioned revealing images. Her voice and vocal phrasing dig deep into the words and invest them with an added sense of drama.
You’ll hear a small assortment of instruments fueling “Waterfall”. However, drumming is arguably the most important. The guitar adds plenty of upper register muscle to the piece, but it’s the emphatic partnership that the percussion shares with the vocal that will likely be your enduring musical memory of this single. The guitar contributions to this track pack plenty of punch and fills the song with unexpected grit and gravitas.
There isn’t an aspect of the recording that’s out of kilter. Jules and her collaborators structure “Waterfall” like a continuous, uninterrupted listening experience. Renowned two-time Grammy award-winning producer Marc Swersky bears responsibility for that, and his clear chemistry with Jules will likely continue producing first-class fare like this. As well, Seth Von Paulus’ mix for the song plays an enormous role in determining its success.
She put in the time birthing the song, assembled the necessary elements to pull it off, and gave herself over to the process in full. This is an artist who trusts herself and has surrounded herself with like-minded creatives who understand what they have. Taylor Jules is essentially just starting out but bears all the marks of a possibly transformational figure. “Waterfall” is a profoundly affecting tune but hints at so much more. There’s no question that she’ll get to show us what she’s capable of as the years unfold.
Cleopatra Patel